The present disclosure relates to a multilayer ceramic electronic component in which withstand voltage characteristics are improved by decreasing a step portion in a component of a high-capacitance multilayer ceramic electronic component, and a method of manufacturing the same.
A multilayer ceramic electronic component includes a plurality of stacked dielectric layers, internal electrodes disposed to face each other with respective dielectric layers interposed therebetween, and external electrodes electrically connected to the internal electrodes.
Such a multilayer ceramic electronic component has been widely used as a component in computers, mobile communications devices such as personal digital assistants (PDA), mobile phones, and the like, due to advantages thereof such as a small size, high capacitance, ease of mountability, or the like.
As electronic products have been reduced in size and have had multifunctionality implemented therein, electronic components have also become compact and highly functional, and thus a multilayer ceramic electronic component which is small but has high capacitance has been demanded.
Generally, in a method of manufacturing a multilayer ceramic electronic component, a ceramic green sheet is manufactured, and an internal electrode layer is formed by printing a conductive paste on the ceramic green sheet. Several tens to several hundreds of ceramic green sheets on which internal electrode layers are formed may be stacked, thereby forming a green ceramic body.
After a hard green ceramic body is formed by compressing the green ceramic body at a high temperature and a high pressure and is cut, a multilayer ceramic capacitor is completed by calcining, sintering, and polishing the cut green ceramic body and forming external electrodes thereon.
As the number of stacked ceramic green sheets has increased, a problem affecting product reliability may occur when the ceramic green sheets are stacked and compressed.
The ceramic green sheet is composed of an internal electrode formation portion and a margin portion, an internal electrode non-formation portion. When the ceramic green sheets are compressed after stacking, a step portion between the internal electrode formation portion and the margin portion may be increased, which can deteriorate withstand voltage characteristics.
The step portion may be generated due to a difference in density of the internal electrodes and the dielectric layers between the internal electrode formation portion and the margin portion.
In order to solve the step portion problem as described above, a method of adding a separate ceramic material to a margin portion of a ceramic body using a negative printing method has been used. However, it can be significantly difficult to separately print ceramic slurry on the margin portion, the internal electrode non-formation portion, in the ceramic green sheet.
Furthermore, the method of adding a separate ceramic material to the margin portion using the negative printing method does not have a high precision and thus may not sufficiently decrease the step portion when there is an alignment defect of the ceramic green sheet after stacking.